In 1966, when Mao was seventy-three, he worried that the revolution he had led was sputtering. It was failing its ideals, its dreams. The party leaders were complacent, and they wouldn’t always let him have his revolutionary way. Mao believed they were evolving into just another greedy ruling class, like the former one that they had put an end to. When he died, Mao asked, would the revolution carry on? It was time, he said, to shake the nation.
So Mao unleashed the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He demanded purges of the highest ranks within the party; anyone who lacked the zeal for revolution had to go. He gathered regiments of students and young workers to impel the revolution forward. Waving books of Mao quotations, they denounced the lifestyles of the “middle class,” demolished temples, and attacked and sometimes killed administrators and their teachers. To avoid harassment by the Red Guards, intellectuals destroyed their books and art collections. They often killed themselves.
When it looked as if the country had descended into rule by mobs and, to make things worse, the mobs were fighting one another in the streets, army leaders intervened. They talked with Mao, who authorized them to bring back order. They suppressed the zealots or dispatched them to the countryside. Inside their offices, however, party members carried on the Cultural Revolution. They intrigued against each other, and they sent 3 million teachers, students — even party workers — to labor camps or prisons, or to work on farms. To make things worse, with all the chaos, the economy broke down.
By this time, Mao was in his eighties and unwell. He had led a revolution that transformed the biggest country in the world. With brutality and mass murders he, and others in the CCP, had brought a hectic, muddled order to chaotic China. At least on paper, Chinese peasants now were just as good as anybody else, and women had rights they never had before. However, ordinary people lived like rookies in a boot camp, and many million peasants still were hungry,
When the “Great Helmsman” died in 1976, radicals and middle-of-the-roaders struggled to succeed him. From behind the scenes emerged a longtime party leader, Deng Xiaoping, then seventy-two. Deng had been a leader of the party moderates and had twice been in Mao’s or the CCP’s disfavor. During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards had so tormented his oldest son that he leaped from a window and could never walk again. Deng now became the leader of the country, although nominally he was vice chairman of the CCP. He placed reform-minded practical men in top positions.
Deng proposed a startling program of reform and won the backing of the CCP. Gorbachev in Russia was doing much the same thing at the same time. Without admitting he was doing it, Deng largely threw out communism and focused instead on economic growth. He dismantled the communes, which had never been successful; private farmers got their land back. He encouraged private enterprise — yes, capitalism — and making money. (Amazingly, one of the government’s slogans was “To get rich is glorious.”) He pushed for more consumer goods, and factories now began to make the things that people wanted, such as washing machines and motorcycles.
Deng’s program got results. Farmers now produced much more, and China even sold some food abroad. The gross national product had risen slowly under Mao, but in the 1980s it rose on average 9 percent a year. In parts of China living standards rose to heights the Chinese never knew before. By the early 1990s China was the world’s biggest producer of coal, cement, and grain, and cotton, meat, and fish.
China also tried to curb its growing numbers. Like many other countries, especially the poor ones, China had a swiftly growing population. When the CCP took over the Chinese had numbered over half a billion, but by 1982 there were twice as many. The growing numbers threatened to outweigh any economic gains. So China took a daring step and set a limit of one child per family. Those who broke the law were fined and lost their rights to housing and to education. For a while this rigid limit worked and helped to slow the country’s population growth. Later, though, many families broke the law, and, in effect, it died.
China’s economic boom time had its downside. While many people lived much better than they ever had before, above all in the cities, the majority of peasants still were very poor. Meanwhile, the government didn’t move as swiftly with reforms as it could have. The CCP refused to liquidate the state-owned industries, even though they made no money. And as in many of the poorer countries, corruption was widespread. Government leaders were closely tied to businesses, both the state-owned and the private ones, and could easily take bribes.
Despite the widespread economic gains, discontent arose. Intellectuals and younger educated people were aware that in other communist countries, such as Gorbachev’s Russia, liberalization was under way. Many people now had short-wave radios, and they heard the British BBC, French Radio, and the Voice of America in Chinese. They learned how people lived in other nations, and they urged the CCP to loosen its controls. They claimed the right to call attention to corruption and to defects in the ruling system.
But Deng and other leaders of the Party would have none of it. They had freed up the economy, and that made sense. But they were firmly set against democracy, which they thought could only lead to chaos. It might also cause what was truly unthinkable: the downfall of the CCP.
In 1989 students demonstrated in Beijing in the enormous square called Tiananmen, or Gate of Heavenly Peace. Here Mao had declared the founding of the People’s Republic forty years before, and from his giant portrait far above them Mao smiled blandly on the activists. They demanded change and set in place a plaster statue of a “Goddess of Democracy.” Ordinary citizens and other students joined them, till a million people may have crowded in and near the square. As the world looked on via television, the demonstrations grew intense.
How would Deng respond? He discussed the crisis secretly with other party elders. A transcript of their talk, which is probably authentic, includes these comments:
DENG XIAOPING: We all feel Beijing just can’t go on like this; we have to have martial law.
CHEN YUN: We have to stick with our principles no matter what…. It seems to me that if we can’t even hold to these principles, then what we’re doing is destroying our People’s Republic — which we won from decades of battle, with the blood of thousands of revolutionary martyrs — all in a single day.
WANG ZHEN: Give ’em no mercy! The students are nuts if they think this handful of people can overthrow our Party and our government! These kids don’t know how good they’ve got it…. If the students don’t leave Tiananmen on their own, the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] should go in and carry them out.3
3The Tiananmen Papers, compiled Zhang Liang, ed. Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link (2001), pp. 204, 207, 208.
After a month and a half the party leaders sent in soldiers, tanks, and armored cars. The soldiers opened fire, and over several days they killed hundreds of Chinese. (The number is disputed.) At one point a man stepped bravely in front of a column of advancing tanks. He wore slacks and a white shirt, and held what looked like a shopping bag. He addressed the crew of the lead tank, probably urging restraint. The tank commander rose to the moral challenge by not mowing down the man, whom others pulled away to safety.
A shaggy-haired young student shouted at a foreign reporter, “Tell the world!” He grabbed his shoulder, screaming, “You’ve got to tell the world what’s happening, because otherwise all this counts for nothing. So tell the world!”
The world did hear about the demonstrations and was shocked by how the CCP had dealt with them. But the freedom movement led, at least at first, to very little. Deng continued to oppose democracy. He pretended that his country’s economic system was still communist, which meant that the protestors were counterrevolutionaries who “attempted to install capitalism in China.” Of course installing capitalism was just what he himself was doing.
After Deng died, China carried on with his contradictory system of capitalism under autocratic rule. The government continued to free the economy. Before Deng, the state-owned businesses had
produced more than three-quarters of the country’s output; by the time he died, they produced less than a third. And in spite of many problems, such as government corruption, business thrived and many Chinese lived much better than they had ever dreamed they would. It was said that under Mao everyone had longed to have the “Four Musts”: a bicycle, a radio, a watch, and a sewing machine. Under Deng they wanted the “Eight Bigs”: a color television, a refrigerator, a stereo, a camera, a motorcycle, a suite of furniture, a washing machine, and an electric fan.
China, as we said, was no democracy; it was a single-party despotism. But although the party still commanded, it was not as rigid as before. For the first time, newspapers dared to tell about a man who actually sued the police, or how a little boy had been abandoned by his parents and ignored by the authorities. Talk radio appeared, and listeners called in to give their views on garbage pickup, factory smoke, whether girls could keep their bras on during medical checkups at their schools, or what to do about a boss (in private business) who forced his employees to work sixteen hours a day.
It’s often said that capitalism cannot function in an authoritarian system. But China was trying to make it work.
INDIA, THE OTHER GIANT, had a history unlike China’s. Back when Britain joined India to its empire, in the early 1800s, India hadn’t been one single country, and the British never tried to glue the parts together. At the end of World War II, when our story starts, the people of “India” still were not a single country.
However, many Indians had dreams and plans. They wanted independence, and they wanted to unite and form a single nation. Chief among these men — for nearly all were men — was old Mohandas Gandhi, who had for decades taught and fought (if that’s the word) for his convictions. He wanted India’s independence from the British, but he believed the way to reach it (and reach any other goal) was with nonviolent means. He once had caught the world’s attention by leading villagers on a march to the sea to protest a British monopoly on making salt. The monopoly hit the poorest Indians the hardest. As they walked, admirers sprinkled water on the dusty road in front of Gandhi and his marchers and covered it with leaves and flowers. Gandhi won his goal; the British granted anyone the right to make salt for personal use.
As the salt march shows, Gandhi was a man of symbols and public drama. In order to encourage Indians to make their cloth, and not to buy it from abroad, he had himself photographed while spinning cotton thread (ineptly) on a wheel. When he went to tea at the palace of the king of England, India’s ruler, he wore nothing on his skinny body but a loincloth. When India’s Hindus and Muslims killed each other, Gandhi fasted nearly to death until they stopped. Many called him the Mahatma, or Great Soul, but he deplored this. “They say I am a saint trying to be a politician,” he said, “but I am only a politician trying to be a saint.”
Gandhi’s leading follower, much younger than he, was Jawaharlal Nehru. His father had been a well-known leader of India’s independence movement. Nehru was a moody, thoughtful politician. Although he was a sometimes imperious Brahman aristocrat, India’s poverty deeply troubled him. The ordinary Indian understood this, and loved him. Even though in former decades India’s British governors had jailed him nine times, he admired British democracy and wanted India to have it after the British left. At the same time, however, he saw Russia as a better social/economic model for his country than Britain. He believed the Russians had demonstrated how socialism could enrich a poor and backward country.
During World War II, Indians fought beside the British, but the New Imperialism was near its end. It was clear that when the fighting ended, troubled consciences and outside pressures would impel the Europeans to release their colonies. Knowing that the time was ripe, Gandhi, Nehru, and the Indian National Congress party demanded in the wartime years that the British “quit India.” Because it needed India’s help in waging war, Britain promised independence when the war was over.
When the war had ended and they had to carry out that promise, the British faced this problem: what about the Muslims? Although they were fewer than the Hindus, more Muslims lived in India than in any other country in the world. A body called the Muslim League was their spokesman, and the League insisted that the Muslims have a country of their own. They feared that if the Muslims stayed in India, the Hindu majority would not respect their civil and religious rights. The Congress party on the other hand opposed the notion of permitting Muslim areas to leave what had always been considered “India.” They wanted a united India in which, they said, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and other sects would worship as they pleased.
Reluctantly the British chose to do what the Muslim League demanded. Out of ancient “India” they carved two nations. The smaller Muslim part would be the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. (Incredibly, defying common sense, Pakistan would have two sections, separated from each other by a thousand miles of northern India. Later, after a civil war, the eastern section became the independent nation Bangladesh.)
All the rest of traditional India would be the huge Republic of India. Its population then numbered a third of a billion. The vast majority of these were Hindus, but about a tenth (even after Pakistan had broken off) were Muslims, and a considerable number were Sikhs. The Indians were divided not only by religion but by culture, and they spoke fifteen officially recognized languages. One thing they had in common was that most of them were very poor.
Independence was declared in August 1947. As the hour approached, Nehru spoke in the constituent assembly. He said, “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will wake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”
However, freedom carried with it tragedy as Hindus and Muslims immediately rioted against each other. At least 10 million Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims fled their homes on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, all fearing to be trapped inside a nation hostile to their faith. As they tried to reach a land where they could live in safety, religious enemies slaughtered a million of them.
Five months later, a Hindu fanatic lay in wait for Gandhi, whom he blamed for favoring the dividing of India, which Gandhi had in fact deplored. He shot the old man as he walked to evening prayer in a garden in New Delhi. In a broadcast to the nation, Nehru said, “The light has gone out of our lives and darkness is everywhere.”
When one thinks about its history, the fact that India had chosen to have a democratic government is stunning. Most other newborn nations at this time were falling under the rule of tyrants. In China, for example, the CCP would soon (in 1949) impose its iron grip. Could a democracy cope with India’s giant problems? Let us briefly list them. Most Indians lived in poverty, and its hungry people were increasing every year by five million. Religious hatred could lead at any time to massacres, and India’s neighbors, Pakistan and China, were often hostile. And three Indians out of four couldn’t read and were perhaps incapable of taking part in a democracy.
For Nehru and the upper classes, the easy way to rule the country would have been with force. Instead, they chose the governmental system of Great Britain, the very country that had ruled India for a century and a half. Nehru, and many other educated Indians, even though they had struggled against British rule, believed in democracy. Therefore he and the parliament built what proved to be a staunchly democratic state. It soon turned out that in elections everybody willingly voted, even if they couldn’t read and even if the candidates had nothing to offer. An Indian politician once observed that an Indian election was like sheep choosing a shepherd.
Nehru was a socialist — but not a communist — at heart. He believed that the British Empire, which had ruled his country for so long, was itself the expression of capitalism. Under British rule and British capitalism, Indians had lived in poverty. Therefore capitalism was an evil, even if British democracy was a good. Moreover, India could prosper by itself; it had no
need of foreign, capitalist assistance. Like Stalin’s Russia, India could improve its economy alone. The way to do this was with Five Year Plans, as Russia had done.
As with China, India’s biggest problem was (and is) its poverty. In its huge and crowded cities, in its half a million villages, nearly everyone was poor. Millions slept in the streets. In parts of the state of Uttar Pradesh, in the north, it was common to eat one meal a day. In one place there the “untouchable” farm laborers were so poor that they often ate the seeds of grain that they picked from animal feces and then washed.
Families had too many children, but for a reason. Among the rural poor, around the world, children can be assets. They help to work the family’s land, and they care for their parents when they’re old. So having many children is the next best thing to a social security system. Up to a point, at least, the poor aren’t poor because they have many children; they have many children because they’re poor. However, it’s true that too many is too many, bad for the family, bad for the country.
Prosperous Indians had learned to live with poverty around them. In the early 1970s, a doctor smoothly reassured the India Council of Medical Research that “certain hormonal changes within the bodies of the malnourished children enable them to maintain normal body functions…. Only the excess and non-essential parts of the body are affected by malnutrition. Such malnourished children, though small in size, are like ‘paperback books’ which, retaining all the material of the original, have got rid of the non-essential portions of the bound editions.”
The Human Story Page 39